Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Despite the ample criticism of the term colorblindness as a misguided and/or halfhearted response to racism, few scholars have undertaken as thorough and pointed a study of this phenomenon as Milazzo (English, Univ. of Johannesburg, South Africa). She goes well beyond asserting that colorblindness is either wishy-washy rhetoric or an ignorant response to accusations of racism, demonstrating instead, through an interlinked series of meticulously researched and persuasively argued chapters, that it pervades the history of colonialism--and postcolonialism--as a tool that allows power structures to disavow their own inherent white supremacy. The book begins with an overview of the topic that forestalls any potential complaints that Milazzo overdetermines the parallels among the various national contexts she surveys in subsequent chapters. They nimbly interweave anecdotes, commentaries, theory, archival materials, and literary texts from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, South Africa, and the US. Milazzo's thoughtful exposition delineates those countries' simultaneously necessary and covert deployment of ostensibly colorblind language in creating and perpetuating policies that enact various forms of violence on their Black populations. An invaluable expansion of Whitewashing Race (CH, Apr'04, 41-4987) by Michael K. Brown et al.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers and advanced undergraduates through faculty.